Pride and a Day at the Beach

This has been an extremely busy weekend! On Friday, a large group of my friends and I drove out to LA for Pride. We left for LA after work and dinner and arrived around 9pm that night. Most of the festival area was blocked off but there was still one stage and a bunch of food vendors set up. We hung out there for a while listening to music and just wandering around the open stores and adjoining streets. Most of the clubs in the area were packed with people celebrating Pride, but we didn't go into any of those due to our age.

We were going to crash at the dorm of a friend in LA, so we left around midnight to meet up with her so that she could let us in. We split up to head to the two cars we had taken to LA and right when I got back to the car I was in, I got a call from someone in the other group saying that their car was locked into the parking garage they had chosen: no overnight parking. When we finally got to the dorm we were staying at, we made plans for the morning to figure out how to find and get the car. We probably went to sleep around 1am.

The next morning we had to get up really early because Tessa had made plans to go rowing with the LA rowing club early that morning (which was part of the reason we came to stay in LA this weekend). We left the dorm around 7am and dropped Tessa off at the lake for her rowing. The rest of us stopped for breakfast at a cafe nearby then drove back to the parking garage to try and figure out what happened to the car. Luckily, it was still there with only a $24 ticket.

Once we had the car back, we all drove back to Marina del Rey at about 10am to pick up Tessa. We then drove to the nearby beach to hang out for a few hours. We bought some snacks and water at a local market and set up camp on the beach. We spent some time in the water and just lounging around napping and enjoying the weather. The sun was out for most of the day, but the breeze off the water made it a bit cold.

At around 2:30pm we left the beach to find some food then drove back into the city to go to Pride again. It cost some money to get into Pride, so only some of us went into the festival while the others stayed outside to shop and just hang out. The weather in the city was much warmer than at the ocean and the festival was packed! We spent a couple hours just wandering around looking at all the booths and all the people. There were three stages with music of some sort scattered throughout the festival as well as a lot of different booths giving away free stuff.

We looked around the festival until about 6pm at which point we met up with the group outside and walked back to our cars. At the beginning of the drive back, traffic seemed pretty awful so we stopped to get some food. We chose a random exit hoping to find a gas station of some sort to buy some snacks, but found ourselves in an Asian district of some point. We decided to go into the Asian supermarket to buy food which, while not particularly exciting, was more interesting due to our appearance. A couple people had gotten face-paint and temporary tattoos which must have made us a sight to see in the supermarket, we certainly attracted quite a bit of attention while there.

With our snacks, we headed back into the city and finally arrived back at Mudd around 8pm. We hung out for a while before going to bed and planned for a quite morning today, which I took advantage of by sleeping. Besides the sunburns we obtained at the beach, it has been a fantastic and busy weekend!